We wanted to tell everybody about a great website we really love: www.Greenhome.com

Green Home sells a huge range of eco-friendly products, and they are one of the oldest and most respected online green retailers.

The products they sell are truly green, and they have a low price guarantee. Best of all, for a limited time, they are offering friends of Green Key Real Estate 10% off any purchase on Greenhome.com. Just enter "greenkey" at checkout.

Happy greening!!

Chris

1603 18th Street

$665,000

Beautiful corner unit with great light and city views.
Walk to great restaurants on 18th Street.
3 levels, 14 foot ceilings, 2 bedrooms, 2 baths
Remodeled kitchen
Wood floors
In-unit washer & dryer
HOA dues: $447.30/month
1 deeded parking space & storage

First Open House this Sunday, February 28, 2:00 - 4:00

Contact:

Jan Small
Cell: 415 816-2253
JSmall@GreenKeyRealEstate.com

From: GreenerBuildings Staff

San Francisco, CA — San Francisco has established the nation’s largest green financing program to allow businesses and homeowners to pay for efficiency, water conservation and renewable energy improvements through future property taxes.

The Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program will make $150 million in bonding capacity available to the city’s property owners beginning March 1.

The low-cost loans, which are paid back through property taxes over their lifetime, typically within 20 years, are attached to the property, not the property owner. Eligible property owners will have paid their property taxes on time for the previous three years.

An Oakland-based company called Renewable Funding will administer and provide capital for the program. Its president, Cisco DeVries, developed the PACE financing program in nearby Berkeley while working as the mayor’s chief of staff.

PACE programs have been hailed as a way for property owners to avoid the barrier of high upfront costs. More than a dozen states now have PACE programs in place, while Renewable Funding said it is currently developing additional programs for more than 100 communities in several states.

“In signing this legislation, Mayor (Gavin) Newsom has put the final piece in place to allow tens of thousands of San Francisco property owners to have the opportunity to reduce their water and energy footprint, all while creating local green jobs,” DeVries said in a statement this week.

The news comes less than a week after Newsom announced $19.2 million in funds for energy efficiency projects through the city’s Energy Watch program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The money will be used for free on-site assessments, installations of energy efficient equipment and lighting, and retrofits of municipal buildings, such as the Ella Hutch Center and Southeast Health Center.

There's a new Green Drinks in Marin County. Please visit our Facebook page, become a fan and join us the 2nd Tuesday of the month. Hope to see you there!

Marin Green Drinks Facebook Page

Thanks,

Chris

By: Nancy Astrid Lindo

Planning on wanting to save some money? Consider a green retrofit! It can be as simple as changing out some fixtures or as complex as having an entire energy audit done to your home.

What many people don’t realize is the reality that with a modest investment, one can ultimately save hundreds of dollars annually in addition to having a lighter carbon and water footprint.

Think of this upgrade like putting your home on a diet, per se, something that would result in a healthier home for you and your family, in addition to creating green habits for all!

Start with the finite natural resources that you use, such as energy and water. Is it ever being wasted by leaving a light on or perhaps forgetting to turn the water off as your washing the dishes? An excellent point of reference is to start by being aware of how you consume these resources. Adding inexpensive aerators to all the faucets will guarantee that you will save one gallon of water per minute. A showerhead can easily be adapted and will also save a gallon per minute without compromising a memorable shower. Annually thousands of gallons are wasted while waiting for the water to get hot, consider collecting that water to quench your plants thirst.

Adding power strips at all outlets, that have multiple plugs, can not only safe you money and prevent phantom loads while also eliminating excess electromagnetic fields.

Confirm that all your doors and windows are sealed properly and that every door has a threshold. Older homes have the tendency to leak air into and out of the home, something that may be solved with some chalking. For more serious issues consider an energy retrofit which would solve all these issues. Companies such as Recurve are not only the national experts but are also Bay are based.

Next time you go shopping think twice about the items you purchase, it is estimated that we discard an estimate 95% of purchased items 6 months after being bought. Being a discerning shopper will save you money, space and time while eliminating the need of discarding more stuff. Opt out of purchasing something cheap, that may very well be made with toxic materials, and try to find it second hand. Can’t find it at your local thrift store? It is worth spending the extra amount to avoid needing to replace the cheaper version.

Incorporate this in your food shopping as well and take advantage of the bulk section. Not only will you take advantage of great prices but you will reduce your need for packaged goods! Personally, I reuse my plastic bags over and over again – most stores will also credit you for every bag you re-use.

Start applying all these simple tips into your daily life and begin to enjoy the savings. You may not notice them initially but over the span of a few months or so, the savings will start to add up!

From: treehugger.com

by Brian Merchant, Brooklyn, New York on 02. 5.10

A great new bill was introduced to Congress yesterday (how often do you get to write a sentence like that these days?). Authored by Bernie Sanders (I-VT), it would create incentives and tax rebates for solar roofs and solar water heaters. The bill aims to get 10 million solar roofs and 200,000 solar heaters up and running--producing a total of 30,000 megawatts--over the next 10 years. Quite frankly, this is a very, very good idea.

First of all, 'distributed' solar projects like those that appear on roofs and along transmission lines are enjoying a surge right now. 1300 megawatts of such distributed solar projects have been approved in California in just the last couple of weeks. Why is this? Because distributed solar is far more versatile and easier to get clearance install--they face far fewer regulations than mammoth solar plants like those proposed for the Mojave desert.

As a result, such projects are popping up all over the place, especially in states with solar incentives like California. Sanders' bill, in fact, uses those incentives as a model for his legislation. Here's Grist on what Sanders' bill would do:

the "10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act" ... would provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey (not coincidentally, Nos. 1 and 2 in installed solar in the U.S.). It also includes measures to insure that those who receive assistance get information on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.
Such a generous tax break would make distributed solar extremely attractive, especially considering that the price of photovoltaic cells keeps on dropping. Additional benefits include the fact that distributed solar--like solar roof--projects can be easily linked to the grid, and can create jobs swiftly, thanks to the fact that there are relatively few assessment hurdles to be jumped.

Dave Roberts interviewed Sanders about his new bill, and while the entire piece is well worth reading, I'll excerpt a couple of the pertinent bits here:

On what the bill would cost:
Bernie Sanders: "We think this will cost between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, and at the end of a 10-year period we are going to be producing 30,000 new megawatts of energy--the equivalent of what 30 nuclear power plants produce. This is a very cost effective way of producing that energy.

On the mechanics of the bill:
"Remember that there are already a lot of tax credits, federal and in many states. The federal tax credit would be up to 30 percent off the cost of a project. That's a lot. Let's say hypothetically you wanted to spend $40,000 on solar. If you take 30 percent off that, you're down to $28,000. If you get state help you're down to $25,000. Then the federal government would pay half of that.

"That's a pretty good deal! It could be a major incentive for people to use photovoltaics. And the more photovoltaics we use, the more will be built; the more that are built, the cheaper it becomes."

10 Million Solar Roofs
If this goes forward, it will be a great way to stimulate development in solar more evenly across the nation, creating jobs, and adding clean energy capacity in a sort of easily digestible, piecemeal fashion.

In essence, this is a quick, relatively efficient, relatively inexpensive way to create clean energy and jobs. To say that we need more senators with vision like Sanders' may be the understatement of the year.

From: The New Republic

Companies have been making misleading claims about the eco-friendliness of their products for almost as long as people have cared about the environment. Back in 2007, the marketing firm TerraChoice went into an unnamed big-box retailer and evaluated the green-advertising claims of more than 1,000 products. Only one actually lived up to its promises. But now, according to Greenwire, the Federal Trade Commission may finally start cracking down hard on this sort of "greenwashing":

David Vladeck, director of FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection last summer that tougher enforcement and environmental guidelines are a major part of the commission's agenda.

"In response to the explosion of green marketing in recent years, the agency initiated a review of its Green Guides to ensure that they are responsive to today's marketplace," Vladeck said in his written testimony. The commission is looking into topics beyond the scope of the existing guides, he noted, "because many currently used green claims, such as 'sustainable' and 'carbon neutral,' were not common when the Commission last revised the Guides."

The FTC already goes after a few strains of greenwashing—last year, for instance, Kmart got dinged for advertising a line of paper plates as "biodegradable" when they didn't actually decompose. But there are so many different ways to greenwash that the FTC can't go after everything. For instance, a product could claim to use "50 percent more recycled content" in its packaging when that really means a (negligible) increase from 2 percent to 3 percent. Or a product could claim to be "100 percent natural" when some of those "natural" ingredients include hazardous substances like arsenic. TerraChoice has posted a taxonomy of the major greenwashing tactics.

Meanwhile, as Vladeck mentions, there's a whole new set of issues cropping up in response to climate concerns. One big question is whether the FTC will start looking more closely at carbon offsets. It's not always easy for consumers to tell whether a given offset project will actually lead to a real reduction in greenhouse gases. What if the offsets are going toward projects (like reforestation) that would have happened anyway? So the FTC could apply more scrutiny in this field, although industry groups are opposed to the idea—especially since the commission isn't necessarily the ideal agency to set offset regulations. But as long as Congress dithers in passing a climate bill, different agencies are likely to take up different aspects of emissions issues in this sort of ad hoc manner.

From: MSNBC

By Rebecca Agiewich
msnbc.com contributor
updated 9:28 a.m. PT, Fri., Feb. 12, 2010

Most of us will never experience the thrill of Olympic victory. Our decrepit old computers and TVs, on the other hand, might make it to the podium as glittering gold medals — thanks to an innovation from this year's winter Olympics.

The 2010 games will boast the first medals in Olympic history to contain metal recovered from end-of-life electronics that would otherwise go to the landfill.

The innovative “Metals to Medals” project — a partnership between Canadian mining company Teck and the Vancouver Organizing Committee — is one of many initiatives that organizers are touting as part of a broad effort to make these games the most "sustainable" ever.

The multitude of green projects detailed here seems fitting for a city that hopes to become the world’s greenest by 2020. Some of the highlights, according to the Vanouver Organizing Committee, or VANOC:

- The Olympic and Paralympic Village in the city of Vancouver is scheduled to become a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood after the games and has already won numerous sustainability awards.

- Unused fuel from the more than 12,000 Olympic torches will be recycled and their cylinders re-used; the torches are also constructed of recyclable materials such as steel and aluminum.

- A Lost and Found program will do double duty: distributing items left behind at the games to low-income, inner-city residents, while keeping the items out of landfills.

- VANOC will offset all carbon emissions related directly to the games, while spectators have been asked to voluntarily offset their own.

> Read More

From: 50+ Builder

Entire online magazine article at the link above.

From: Jetson Green

When it comes to green building, indoor air quality is something you can't neglect. One of ways to build and renovate with a focus on indoor air quality is to use a no- or low-VOC interior paint. Going with a VOC-free paint color (both the paint and the tint) is the only way to do things these days.

According to the EPA, a volatile organic compound is a gas that's emitted from a solid or liquid, and, although there are many different VOCs, some of them can have short- or long-term adverse health effects.
Pretty much every paint manufacturer makes a no- or low-VOC option, but that doesn't mean they're all the same. The value spectrum includes various considerations, such as application, odor, maintenance, appearance, and texture.

New York Times columnist Stephen Treffinger recently tested 10 different brands of eco-friendly indoor paints and compared his top six choices in an article, "Finally, Good-Looking Non-Toxic Paint?" He said the following paints performed the best for these reasons:

Yolo Colorhouse Interior No-VOC
Chalky finish, easiest to clean, had a slight odor, $44.95 a gallon.

Safecoat Zero VOC Flat
Applied thickly and easily, had a pleasant smell, cleaned well, $49.95 a gallon.

Benjamin Moore Natura
Applied smoothly, easy to clean, and available in 3,000 shades, $49.99 a gallon.

Mythic Interior Flat Latex
Flat finish, easy to clean, mild ammonia smell, dynamic colors, $49.99 a gallon.

Stark Paint Velvet Emulsion
Smooth and creamy application, mild ammonia smell, $76.70 a gallon.

Farrow & Ball Estate Emulsion
Applied easily, smelled like wet cement, didn't clean well, $80 a gallon.

You've probably had the opportunity to use or test various different "green" paints ... what do you think? What's the best and greenest interior paint that you've found? Why?